About book The Berlin Stories: The Last Of Mr Norris/Goodbye To Berlin (1963)
This book is composed of 2 previously separately published stories: THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS which the author Christopher Isherwood, dedicated to his long-time friend W. H. Auden and GOODBYE TO BERLIN which was the basis of the play I AM A CAMERA and CABARET starring Liza Minnelli. I know some lines in that song but I had no chance of seeing neither the movie nor the play.I bought this book at Fully Booked Greenhills at its full price (less than US$20) at postponed reading it for sometime. When Ondoy struck, it also got wet from rain coming from window. So, when the typhoon left, I started reading this right away. The reason I bought this book is that it never showed up in any Booksale outlets have been visiting since the start of the year. Also this is in the 501 MUST READ BOOKS and among the TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST AMERICAN NOVELS OF THE 20TH CENTURY.It was a good buy. I made the right decision of buying and reading this book. The fact that this book was written by CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, who they say is perhaps the first major openly gay writer to be read extensively by a wider audience, gives my reading a different flavor. At first, I was expecting this to be similar to the gay memoir book I read last month, AMERICA'S BOY by Wade Rouse with Holocaust as a background for a dramatic impact. However, the gayness of the stories were limited into those characters being described as in a way that a gay would probably describe a man: detailed and with emphasis on the masculinity, etc. Also, the holocaust or the rise of Herr Hitler only came to the last 40 pages of the book specifically in the GOODBYE TO BERLIN. In other words, how ISHERWOOD presented the stories was totally different that what I would say most readers would expect. In short, this is not formulaic.I am rating this with only 4 stars though because I was not amazed by the first story, THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS. The main protagonist, Mr. Norris was a stupid pathetic man. I could not understand how would he allow his secretary Schmidt harass him to no end. Can he just kill him? However, the second story, GOODBYE TO BERLIN was just brilliant! The character of Sally Bowles was like a clown-prostitute and her being naive and gullible is endearing (unlike the character of Mr. Norris in the first story). However, the character that I really enjoyed was Natasha especially in the scene where Christopher and Nastasha were dining in Natasha's home together with her family. I laughed and laughed at their banters particularly on the number of books that Christopher sold. The last few pages of the second story were haunting as it describes Berlin during the rise of Adolf Hitler. It narrates what happened to the main main male characters, i.e., a Jew like Bernhard, a Nazi like Rudi, and himself Christopher, a communist. Each of those characters seems to dramatize to the reader how was Berlin during the rise of Adolf Hitler. With a number of Holocaust books I have read so far, this one gave me an idea what happened before Hitler killed the Jews. It added a star to my rating.I have another book by Christopher Isherwood in my MARKED TO READ folder: his autobiography LIONS AND SHADOWS and I will read it when I need to have a gay perspective in my wonderful world of books.
With apologies to the similarly time encapsulating THE SOUND OF MUSIC: How do you solve a problem like Christopher Isherwood? In his rather lengthy introduction to THE BERLIN STORIES, Isherwood admits to having difficulty deciding how to present his myriad recollections of pre-WWII Germany. Initially, he thought one long novel but he struggled to find threads strong enough to hold so many characters and paths together in one story line, so he eventually he broke them down into smaller projects such as the two novellas collected here--allowing his memories to coalesce into clumps largely held together by time and place and little else. Today such a project might more likely be allowed the fluid form of memoir as opposed to being forced into the ill-fitting structure of the novel. How much fun and more natural for the author this would have been is hinted at by his enjoyable introduction. A memoir with literary flourishes would have worked better than several memoir-ish novellas. So all that being said, you may wonder why I gave this ****. Ultimately I have surprised myself. Considering that virtually nothing happens over the course of the two novellas, and at times I found myself clambering for any foothold to hold my interest, a strange thing happened. I became lost amid the squalid tenements, beach resort hotels, and the crowded and just barely kempt boarding houses of Isherwood’s Berlin and became friends with the poor and rich alike and everyone in between striving or falling while walking the streets, drinking in dives or going to parties, bordellos and burlesque joints. THE BERLIN STORIES were like moving into a new neighborhood, the lines between familiar and unfamiliar blur and then vanish until it is like you have always been there and can never imagine forgetting what you have seen. The image of each person is so vividly crafted that many of them remain projected in my mind long after their moments upon the page and I was left wondering what happened next in the life of everyone who passed through the stories. At first it bothered me that so many lives dropped from the authors hands without seeming to go anywhere but I came to accept that as part of the point. While the Nazi’s are barely referenced, it is understood that they are always lurking—an inescapable tragedy that will toss millions of lives into the air let alone the relatively few presented here. Few realize that their lives really aren’t going anywhere despite the mad dash of the every day. As each character fell away from the narrative, I could not help but imagine them kind of freezing in place and awaiting the massive wave of WWII much like the main character of Francois Truffaut’s 400 BLOWS who finally manages to run away to the beach only to find he doesn’t know what to do next. As all these lives mount over the course of the two novellas, the power of expectation increases. What will become of all those characters left standing on the shore waiting for that wave to come for them?
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I have to clarify with my 3 star rating that this is an average because it is really two different books in one. The first one is The Last of Mr. Norris. If I were reviewing that one alone I would have given it only 2 stars. It is about a man (the author I presume but he used a pseudonym) who rents a room in a flat in Berlin (early 1930s, pre-Hitler) and runs around with communists. He gets involved with Arthur Norris who is a very likable criminal with a fondness for dominatrixes. It's a nice story but was a little boring in parts. The second book is Good-Bye Berlin. I very much enjoyed it and would have given it 4 stars. It's what the play/movie Caberet is based on and it flowed much better than the first one did. It was more of Isherwood’s life in Berlin in the early 1930s. He met up with some interesting characters including Sally Bowles an English actress who longed to be a rich man’s mistress.
—Lenoir
After starting with great expectations, I found "The Berlin Stories" to be incredibly boring. The GR reviews of the book were far more interesting (for me) than the book itself. I guess I like character development as an adjunct to a plot, but not so much all by itself. I found no reason to care about the characters and the minutia of their lives, no matter how well described they were. A pity, since so much was happening in Germany in the time period of the stories (early to mid 1930s). Hope I haven't hurt anyone's feelings.
—Lewis Weinstein
Dear Mr. Isherwood, how is it that we haven't before been introduced? Unlike several other reviewers, I actually adored both novels assembled in this volume. In fact, I may even slightly prefer the oft-panned The Last of Mr. Norris, for although Mr. Norris is obnoxious, his narrative coheres in ways that Goodbye to Berlin does not (and it provides a better glimpse of dear Frl. Schroeder). Of course, I don't mean to knock Goodbye, either, for it's a lovely array of vignettes with some exceedingly well-depicted characters -- the ephemeral Sally Bowles, the ripped Otto, and so on. Particularly delightful is, of course, Isherwood's oblique treatment of sexuality. These are the kind of stories that invite you to paw their margins for inexplicable silences and not-quite heterosexual contact between bodies. The author's prose is funny, tender, and remarkably sexy. Isherwood has taken me by storm.
—Dusty
